lucid.

I am nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-two. Young enough

that when I enter the department store, I lack the self-assuredness that

I’m sure

I will one day gain.

I’m shopping for school clothes,

I think. Or maybe a dress for a dance or some other occasion

I am supposed to care about.

Of course, I am naked.

I cross my arms over my chest, either small-breasted or large,

or nothing at all in the moments that I am still a genderless child,

shoved unwilling into the pink-or-blue, curvy-or-straight capitalistic carnival with its

glaring fluorescents, doubled on the glossy floors

that now I can feel

cold on my bare feet.

I duck behind racks upon racks of clothes that I’m sure

won’t fit

my knobby knees,

my freshman-fifteen belly,

my desire to blend in,

my desire to stand out.

Nothing is right, I know it

from no more than a glance, a brisk brush of fingertips along fabric.

The store becomes more crowded, with

strangers, with

classmates, with

my best friends’ boyfriends. With

my mother a dozen times over, with

my most judgmental aunts, and even – the greatest mortification – with

my most loving teachers.

Panic rises in earnest. What was

an inconvenience,

then a problem,

has grown

into crisis.

My ears buzz with their murmurs now,

my bare ass burns with their stares, directed now

from every angle.

Darting between rows of dresses and jeans is futile;

these sentries of style and sensibility

can't or won't

hide me, and anyway

everyone knows

there’s someone in here

that’s wrong

and they want to see it, want to

witness my mortification to assure themselves it’s not so bad

for themselves, not today

at least.

I consider crawling into the center of a circular rack,

a refugee at the epicenter of an atom-bomb cloud of sequins and shoulder pads,

reenacting my toddlerhood naughtiness told over and over again through the years

with a laugh, never not paired with a reproachful glance, as though

I might just do it again and so must be reminded

that she said

don’t you ever.

But what’s one more transgression today, what

could be worse than this, the

unthinkable, the

unbelieva-

I stop.

I straighten my body. Feel my spine sigh at the release.

Look around through narrowed, discerning, new eyes.

I think, and yet, hear myself thinking, as though I’ve spoken aloud:

there is no way this would ever happen.

The realization breaks like a wave,

I am soaked through with relief.

Then, I think-speak the incantation that frees me:

This is a dream.

I am dreaming.

I confirm this, though I already know it’s true absolutely,

by looking again at the people still milling about. All of a sudden

they’re not looking at me at all. All of a sudden

I don’t know any of them. All of a sudden

they are as faceless as the fears that had held me hostage, hunched and hidden.

And then, the greatest realization of all:

If this is a dream, I can do whatever I want.

I’m still naked.

It never occurs to me to change

that detail with my newfound power.

I turn a cartwheel. Then another.

My adult-sized, post-baby breasts fall into my face when

my hands hit the floor

and I laugh.

More, I think,

I can do more.

I push off the gray corporate carpet with toes that

have always been too long to look cute in sandals,

and move high and slow,

more of a float than a jump.

I land in the middle of the juniors’ section and

jump again, but this time I freeze myself in midair,

strike a ninja pose, or maybe

it's from ballet:

one leg bent under me, the other

extended outward in a frozen kick, stretchmarked thighs

strong and showy.

I begin to rotate in midair, and now I see

myself as if in a movie,

in the third person:

she is spinning slowly, acrobatically, like an artist, like art. She is

in no rush, she takes

in her surroundings with a private smile, gazing

down an outstretched arm

across chipped purple-polished fingernails at

the world that is not her.

Because what is her is perfect.

Is fearless.

Is the very idea of power itself made flesh and

bone and

muscle and

feeling and

thought.

Perfect like a molecule of

any given element

is perfect.

Perfect for the simple fact

of its

being.

One minute or one lifetime later, I wake.

Lucid dreaming, the term arises,

still in thought-speak, before habit even opens my eyes.

I want more than anything to experience it again.

No.

I want more than anything

to move through my waking life that way:

Embodied.

Unashamed.

Unafraid.

Unbothered by the world that is not me.

Perfect.

Lucid.